Delius: A Life in Letters 1862-1908

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

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Thanks, and thanks once again, for sending the Piano Concerto to my dear wife. - We had heard the work here in the Blüthnersaal on Tuesday played by Prof. Schmid-Lindner under the sensitive conducting of Max Schillings. I went to the concert also as critic for the "Musikalisches Wochenblacht" and for the "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" in Leipzig in which you will find a detailed review. It is appearing next week, I assume. / As an intimate tone-poet with a delicate, sensitive inner life you do not count on "thunderous" applause, do you? Nor was it so. But the many first-rank musicians and artists who were present received your composition with the utmost respect. Good heavens, electric light, the usual concert uproar, and - you, just how is all this compatible? I should like to hear the Delius in the twilight, where my gaze fixes on no contours and colours, and where with my fancy free and undistracted by anything extraneous, I can folow you into the regions of your reveries. I felt the same here as I did with "Seadrift". I was enraptured again with your harmonies, with the very individual undercurrent which flows through the concerto "Lyrical-Heroic). Of course it is not a piano concerto in the usual sense, in spite of the over-elaborated virtuoso style of parts of the work. It is a dialogue of symphonic proportions between piano and orchestra, sometimes suggestive of an improvisation, and then again like a sunset landscape veiled beneath a blue haze, or an heroically inspired will, which nonetheless requires tender impressions in order to fulfil itself. Schmid-Lindner played well, Schillings conducted masterfully, the orchestra could have provided a more discreet accompaniment; it overwhelmed many passages (admittedly I was sitting in the fourth row very uncomfortably near the platform!) - 

excerpt from 'Delius: A Life in Letters 1862-1908' pp. 308 (299 words)

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1462117704862